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Wednesday, January 9, 2013

A Little Bit More

I'm sorry this post has to be brief today. Maybe someday I'll fill you in on the adventures of my real life - but I'm not quite ready to yet. So, instead, here are a few things I ran across the other day.

Thing #1

A little while back, I posted about when not to query an agent. Recently, I found this bit of interesting data. Agent Sarah LaPolla, over at Glass Cases, has been gracious enough to share her 2012 month-by-month breakdown of queries she received and manuscripts she asked for - with surprising results.

Unsurprisingly, in 2012 Sarah received the most queries in January (430) and the least in December (152 w. a shortened month), with an average of about 332 queries per month. Now the interesting thing is that even though January and February were her busiest months for submissions, they were also, by far, the months where she requested the most manuscripts.

Hold onto your seats folks. February won Sarah's querying lottery with ... drum roll please ... a 3.6% manuscript request rate. January (2.7%) and November (2.8%) were nearly tied in second. The worst month? October, coming in with just one manuscript request out of 300.

Now, this is just one agent (whom I greatly appreciate for giving us this glimpse into her world), and she goes out of her way to try to make it seem like these numbers aren't quite as intimidating as they really are, but isn't this an interesting tidbit of data about our chances of making it?

Thing #2

Kristin Nelson at Pub Rants also provided a run-down of her yearly stats.
Per her website, of "32,000+ or some big number..." queries sent to her agency, they asked for 81 full manuscripts. Let's see: